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To THe ReaDeR

A clumsy schoolteacher fleeing from the specter of a headless horeseman.

An American father in search of his daughter in France. A ranchwoman
in the Salinas Valley who yearns for companionship and a sense of self-
worth. A postmistress in Mississippi who decides to live at the post office
after feuding with her eccentric family. A terrified soldier in Vietnam who
longs for his Minnesota home.
These are some of the characters and situations you will encounter in
American Short Stories. They are as varied as the geography of the United
States itself. Yet their common denominator is that each is part of a short
story, a form—like jazz or baseball—that some claim is uniquely American.
Of course, thousands of American short stories have been written, and
collections of them abound. What sets this volume apart is its emphasis on
the authors’ writing styles. By examining approaches as diverse as the spare,
understated prose of Ernest Hemingway and the dazzling imagery of Louise
Erdrich, you will come to recognize many elements of style. It has been
said that style is comprised of the fingerprints an author leaves on a story,
making it so unmistakably his or hers that a careful reader can tell who has
written it without the byline.
As many of the writers in this volume have remarked, good reading
comes before good writing. Reading this book and completing the activities
will help you shape your own writing style.
Aside from what you will learn about style, this volume provides an
overview of the American short story’s development from its beginnings
with Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe to
the present. Indeed, many literary historians credit Poe, the master of
horror, with inventing, or at least refining, the short story form. He saw
the short story as different from the novel not only in length but also
in intention and form. Writing when Americans were still trying to create a
distinct literature for their country, Poe developed highly atmospheric, tightly
constructed stories in which brevity and unity contributed to a single,
focused effect.

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Other American writers followed Poe’s example by developing their

own subjects and methods. From the beginning, a particular focus of the
American short story has been the theme of personal identity, often explored
in stories of personal quests that determine an individual’s sense of self
and relationship to others and the world.
During the 19th century, nearly all of the basic themes and issues of the
American short story were introduced and developed by writers such as
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Kate Chopin.
These and other writers focused on specifically American locations,
subjects, and problems, developing a wide range of styles for storytelling.
Their stories arose from local history, moral fables, character studies, and
the dilemmas posed by race and class.
Against the backdrop of westward expansion, the Industrial
Revolution, and wave after wave of immigration, American writers
began to seek insights into the conflicts and dilemmas of the day.
The short story—with its limited cast of characters, few scenes or
episodes, and focus on a single effect—provided a good forum for such
explorations. It was practical, besides. With Americans spread out across
a continent, ten-cent magazines delivered nationwide by mail gave the
country a sense of having its own literature. It also provided a mass market
for short story writers.
Change was even more rapid in the 20th century. Social, political, and
cultural developments included the building of transcontinental highways,
the Constitutional amendment allowing women to vote, and broad recogni-
tion that World War I had introduced a new era of fears and possibilities.
Many 20th-century writers whose works are represented in this book
convey a firm sense of regional identity. Others focus on the lives of people
in the city and the suburbs. Still others explore ethnic identity. The
approaches of these writers range from the use of straightforward plots
with conventional language to the creation of quirky plot lines, points of
view, and narrative voices. The tone ranges from assertive pride to playful
irony to sympathy for suffering and loss.
Since the United States is constantly changing, no single story could
appropriately be called the American story. America is a complex whole,
comprised of countless individual experiences. To read this collection of
short stories is not to define the American experience so much as to learn
from various pieces of it. It is to find yourself—in a phrase borrowed from
John Steinbeck—in search of America.

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on sTYle

As you study this collection of short stories, you will be introduced to

some of America’s most important writers. Almost certainly you won’t
like every one, but each author has a unique message to send and a
distinctive way of sending it. The way a writer conveys a message is called
his or her style. Whether in clothing, music, visual art, or literature, style
is easy to see but hard to define. You might think of style in writing as
the way thoughts are dressed. Analyzing style will make you a more
perceptive reader and help you develop your own writer’s voice. A good
definition of style for this book is that it is the author’s distinctive manner of
expression.
As in most arts, it takes time and familiarity to recognize distinctions
among literary styles. Perhaps an analogy will help here. To the untrained eye,
a forest is just a collection of indistinct trees. To the trained eye, however,
the forest is composed of a grove of white oaks on the hillside, a stand of
willows by the stream, and thorn-bearing hawthorn trees along its edges.
As you read, follow the Literary Lens prompts and pay close attention to the
information about the author’s life and style that precedes each selection.
Before long, clear distinctions will emerge.
In fact, some writers have such distinctive styles that they have
spawned imitators. The works of authors who follow paths blazed by Ernest
Hemingway and William Faulkner are sometimes called “Hemingwayesque”
or “Faulknerian.” Hemingway probably would have been startled by such
praise. He once wrote, “In stating as fully as I could how things were, it was
often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what
they called my style.”
Hemingway is not alone in implying that he never deliberately set out
to create a style, but only wrote as well as he could instinctively. Katherine
Anne Porter once complained, “I’ve been called a stylist until I really could
tear my hair out. And I simply don’t believe in style. Style is you.”
Style is hard to describe because part of it is a certain indefinable
uniqueness. Some aspects of style are easier to pin down, however. That’s
because style includes the set of choices and techniques that enable a writer

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to tell a story. Choices regarding characterization, setting, and tone—to

name a few—impact the style of a story. But there are other sources of style,
such as the author’s background, whether that author is a man or a woman,
and the author’s race or ethnicity.
For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up in modest circumstances
in St. Paul, Minnesota. He later left the Midwest and became fascinated
with the flamboyant rich of the East Coast. Fitzgerald’s descriptions often
mix criticism, sympathy, and awe for the rich lifestyle, as in this one-line
character sketch in his novel The Great Gatsby: “Her voice is full of money.”
The stories of Alice Walker, on the other hand, come out of her experience as
a woman of color growing up in the United States. Her fiction often depicts
a female character finding her way in an environment of oppression.
Personal values also determine writers’ attitudes toward their charac-
ters. John Steinbeck’s sympathies for those who fled the Oklahoma dust
bowl of the 1930s went into his writing about the struggle of common
people for economic justice. Flannery O’Connor’s fiction reflects her devout
Catholicism; her grotesque characters and often violent story lines express
her belief in the need for salvation. The combination of background,
gender, ethnicity, and values makes up the author’s worldview.
Style also develops from writers’ responses to earlier writers they
have read. Some choose to work within a stylistic tradition, such as social
realism, in which the everyday lives of characters are depicted against a so-
cial, political, and economic background that is presented as a matter of fact.
John Steinbeck, Katherine Anne Porter, John Updike, and Russell Banks are
among the American writers in this tradition. Other writers rebel against
tradition or find it necessary to innovate. They develop new styles to convey
a particular point of view. For example, William Faulkner uses interior
monologue to narrate stories through characters whose limitations would
make it impossible for them to tell their stories in the usual way. Ray
Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut use futuristic settings in order to question and
probe current attitudes and trends.
Another aspect of style is tone, or the author’s attitude toward his or her
subject. Words such as “sympathetic,” “comic,” “passionate,” or “harsh” can
be used to describe the attitude of the writer. The tone helps determine the
story’s intellectual and emotional impact on the reader. One of the dominant
tones of fiction in the 20th century is irony. Irony reflects the sadness or
humor resulting from the gap between life as it is idealized and life as it
really is. Generally irony is used to criticize some aspect of society or to

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reveal the silliness of people’s behavior. Irony also results from unusual
or unexpected points of view, oddly humorous situations, and shocking
revelations or sudden turns of event. Sherman Alexie uses ironic humor to
reveal the sad realities of Native American life on and off the reservation.
Flannery O’Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, John Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates,
and T. Coraghessan Boyle are among many whose stories use irony that is
sometimes comic and sometimes bitingly satirical.
Finally, style includes the way a writer uses language. Some writers, like
Thomas Wolfe, are said to be lyrical—that is, expressing intense personal
emotions in much the same way as a songwriter or poet. Some, like
Raymond Carver, are considered minimalists—that is, they let the events
of the story speak for themselves without much interpretation from
the author. Others, like Harry Mark Petrakis, are described as colorful,
meaning full of variety and interest. Still others, such as T. Coraghessan
Boyle, are labeled energetic, writing in a way that is so highly charged the
reader has little choice but to go along for the ride.
Other contributions to style include the language used by the story’s
narrator and in the dialogue of characters; variations in dialect and usage
that are tied to particular groups of people or regions of the country;
repetitions of key words and phrases; and even the length and structure of
individual sentences. Truman Capote once wrote, “I think of myself as a
stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a
comma, the weight of a semicolon.”
Faulkner’s long, sometimes convoluted sentences convey the dynamic
intensity of his characters’ thoughts and emotions while the dialogue of his
characters is written in the rural vernacular of his native Mississippi. The
rhythm of Yiddish storytelling is reflected in the prose of Isaac Bashevis
Singer. The speech of Katherine Anne Porter’s characters often reflects her
roots in rural Texas and the languages of Mexico and other countries in
which she lived. The dialogue of the American-born daughters and native
Chinese mothers in Amy Tan’s stories reveal the barriers that language
differences can create within a family as well as within a society.
Ultimately, how you respond to the author’s style contributes greatly to
the pleasure of reading. As American poet Robert Frost put it, “All the fun’s
in how you say a thing.”

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lITeRaRY eleMenTs of THe sHoRT sToRY

“Once upon a time” is a phrase that beckons young and old alike because
it lets readers or listeners know that a story is coming. Whether it unfolds
through the oral tradition, on the screen of a television, or in the pages of a
book like this one, a story takes us out of our lives and helps us make sense
of them at the same time.
A story can be defined simply as a telling of incidents or events. A useful
definition for this book is that a story is a fictional narrative shorter than a novel.
Whatever the definition, a story contains the following basic elements.

Plot
Simply put, the plot of a story is what happens in it. As one old saying has
it, the writer gets the hero up a tree and then gets him back down again.
Also known as narrative structure, a plot usually includes causality: one
event causes another, which causes another, and so on, until the story
ends. There are a variety of ways that stories move from beginning to end.
The most common plot structure moves from exposition through rising
action to a climax, followed by the resolution.
In the exposition we are introduced to the main character, or
protagonist, in his or her familiar setting—be that a neighborhood
in New York City or a farm in the Salinas Valley of California. If the
narrative continued describing this “normal” life, there would be no
story. A problem or conflict is needed to move the story forward. The
conflict may be external—perhaps between the protagonist and a family
member or between the protagonist and nature; or the problem may
be internal—between the protagonist’s sense of duty and her desire
for freedom, for example. Complex stories often have both external
and internal conflicts. As the conflict deepens, the story is propelled
through the rising action to the climax, or high point. Here that bully
of an aunt is confronted, the lifesaving campfire is started, or the inner
demon is discovered. The tension of the climax is released in the resolu-
tion, or as it sometimes called, the dénouement, a French word that literally
means “untying.” In the resolution, the knot of the conflict is untied and

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everyone that is still alive goes on to a new “normal” existence.

Of course, not all stories conform to the above plot structure. Some
stories start at a high point in the action, employing a technique known as in
media res, which means “in the midst of things.” Such stories will fill in the
exposition along the way through dialogue or embedded stories. Another
approach is to tell the ending first and fill in the rest through flashbacks,
one effect of which is to make the reader pay close attention to motives and
causes. Whatever the plot structure, you can be sure that there will be a
problem and a character to confront it.

Character
Readers keep turning the pages of stories mainly because they are interested
in what happens to the characters. The development of believable char-
acters, called characterization, is perhaps the most basic task of the author.
But writers have many tools at their disposal. Besides direct description of
a character’s traits, the author can also reveal character through actions,
speeches, thoughts, feelings, and interactions with others. Depending on the
type of story being told and the stylistic tradition the author is working in,
characters may be fully drawn and realistic or they may be representative
character types. How important they are to the story determines whether
they are main or primary characters, secondary characters, or minor char-
acters. The more crucial the character is to the plot, the more he or she will be
developed by the author. Even in stories that stress realism, some minor
characters might only be present as types rather than as individuals.
Another important part of characterization is point of view, or the
eyes through which the story is told. This is determined through the author’s
choice of narrator. There are three main narrative points of view: first-
person, third-person limited, and third-person omniscient. In the
first person or “I” point of view, the narrator tells his or her own story as
Huck does in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The third-person limited
narrator is a character in the story and only sees, hears, and knows what
that character can see, hear, and know. This means that he or she might
have only partial knowledge and understanding of the events and other
characters. Doctor Watson of the Sherlock Holmes tales is a good example
of this type of narrator. Often this limited point of view is that of the major
character or protagonist, but sometimes the author chooses to tell the story
from the limited point of view of a secondary character.
The third-person omniscient narrator sees all and is able to comment

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on any aspect of the story because he or she is an outsider, not a character

in the story. Readers often like to equate the omniscient narrator with the
author, but it is good to remember that any narrator or point of view is a
carefully developed tool and not simply the author’s voice. Some stories
switch back and forth between various points of view.

setting
A setting is where and when a story takes place. It is important because
environment has a strong impact on what happens in a story. In this book,
for example, some stories are set in Harlem, New York; a ranching area of
California; and a sleepy town in the Deep South. These environments
influence not only the action but also the characters’ attitudes. Setting can
also help to shape how characters speak and behave. Sometimes the setting
of a story assumes almost as much importance in the reader’s imagination
as memorable characters do.

Theme
The theme is the underlying meaning or message of a story. A story may
evoke more than one theme, depending upon your interpretation of
the narrative. For example, a story in which a character struggles with a
decision to lead a conventional life or seek freedom and adventure could
be interpreted several ways. One person might summarize the theme of
the story as “rash behavior leads to ruin,” whereas another might say “it
is better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all.” Whatever
theme you might come up with for a story, it is important to realize that
the theme statement is not the story. Authors usually don’t write stories
with a theme in mind. They might get an idea for a story from a news
item, which gives them an idea for a character. Once the character is alive
on the page, the character may take the story into places the author never
dreamed. And that is the point, after all. We read stories so that they will
take us to places we have never been before. Have a good trip!

For a full list of literary terms, see the Glossary of Literary Terms on
pages 758–761.

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